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IT’LL be back soon enough. The drama, conspiracy and crisis. But in a week of relative calm it may be worth revisiting the basics.

There’s two things few want to admit.

One: a coup can’t deliver because, assuming the best of intentions, the time needed for reforms to become permanent is longer than the duration a dictator can hang on.

And as soon as the dictator is gone, everything he touched will be rolled back — because that will be the politicians’ revenge and because all the dictator’s reforms will be seen as tainted.

The governance clock will essentially be reset.

Two: politics here is quite fluid, with new options — whole parties, in fact — materialising regularly enough. The myth of perpetual political power is exactly that — a myth.

That’s a good thing. Because new options and new parties potentially means new ideas and new politics. Put those two things together — the pragmatic and the romantic — and you have a pretty solid case against a takeover.

Why bother if it can’t work?

The good thing about the current silliness is that we don’t have to be radically hypothetical. The run-up, context and the figures themselves are all known to us.

If there’s a takeover, it’s easy enough to guess what it would look like: a reboot of Musharraf’s first spell, between 1999 and 2002.

If there’s a takeover, it’s easy enough to guess what it would look like: a reboot of Musharraf’s first spell, between 1999 and 2002.

There’re several reasons for that. The whole conversation of intervention has revolved around not a new system, but a pause to structurally firm up the existing system. That is self-limiting.

Then there’s the court. Every coup needs judicial cover — it’s hardwired into our politics — so the coup-maker can’t just disband the court.

That gives the court leverage and it will use it to impose a relatively short fixed time frame. Musharraf got three years, the next time round it may be just two.

And then there’s Imran. He’s never been PM and for every year there’s a dictator on the scene, that’s one less year Imran has to realise his dream. The PTI’s unwhetted appetite for power will help force a quick return to some kind of ballot box.

The agenda is also relatively easy to guess. It’ll be a rehash of Musharraf’s seven points from Oct 1999 with references to domestic militancy and regional threats layered on top.

After that, the coup-maker will get down to business.

Accountability will be jump-started; a small-ish cabinet of retired generals and Western-trained technocrats will impose discipline; and the finance team will be ordered to deliver blingy, urban-led growth to keep the middle class happy.

Stability is relatively easy to manufacture.

The hard business is structural change. The bureaucracy, police and local governments are the usual suspects. The justice system is usually insulated from a dictator’s reforms crusade because he depends on the judges for legitimacy and protection from legal assault.

But changing how the state is organised and how it interacts with the people is a long-term game. Our dictator will only have a couple of years at first.

Say it’ll take 10-15 years for police reforms to become irreversible — for the institution to be meaningfully insulated from politics and for the results to be significant enough that the people themselves will oppose reversal.

But our dictator will be forced into the political process in two or three years, either creating a new party or formalising an alliance with the PTI.

A return to the political process means two things: compromises that will undercut your governance and reforms agenda; and space for political opponents to start the work of dislodging you politically.

A dictatorship can last an election cycle or two — but three is near impossible.

Because fatigue with the dictator’s rule, the public’s unhappiness with results and the compromises made, and the opposition of the parties he will have shut out from power will grow overwhelming.

Forced into survival mode, the dictator will make more compromises — further eroding his original reforms and governance agenda.

Eventually he’ll be gone and the first job of the triumphant politicians will be to dismantle the dictator’s legacy. Back to square one.

That gap — the five or 10 years between when a dictator’s reforms become irreversible and the number of years he’ll have in power — is the fatal problem of dictatorships.

There is no known workaround. No way of making reforms permanent in a shorter time frame. And no way of hanging on in power longer to protect his reforms.

The system itself prevents a dictatorship from delivering. For that we must be grateful.

Then there’s the other side. The PPP rose in the ’60s, the MQM in the late ’70s/early ’80s, the PML-N as we know it in the early 1990s. The latest is the PTI.

The actual remarkable fact of Pakistani politics is the steady pace at which new options have emerged, roughly one big party every decade or so.

Arguably, if it hadn’t been for the Musharraf years, the PTI would have crested before the Oct 2011 Lahore earthquake. And now the succession struggle in the PML-N could trigger a new party in Punjab.

Politics is not the closed, fundamentally rigged system it is made out to be; new options keep emerging. For all we know, democratic continuity could accelerate the arrival of new political parties and politics.

Flawed as they all are, the PTI, PML-N, PPP and MQM represent reasonable political choice. Add in the rise of new parties or new leaderships and it would look fairly competitive. A degree of political self-cleansing may become possible.

But enough of the pragmatic and the romantic. It’ll be back to drama, conspiracy and crisis soon enough.

On DawnNews

Comments (8) Closed

The prime minister, his cabinet and his party are all aboard so a takeover is unnecessary and the system can focus on raising funds through domestic resources.

If the three major parties somehow score around eighty seats or so each in the next elections, the need to takeover will go below zero and the status quo can be continued happily for one more term.

The secret lies not in launching a campaign to improve governance or to introduce reforms but in continuing the status quo in maintaining the current setup which had been a tested successful mechanism of providing a decent living to the select for over three generations so far.

Idealism may label certain characteristics of the system as flaws but essentially these are carefully incorporated features rooted in our social and cultural history defining our current lifestyle.

Removing these features from the system would be injurious to the careers of the policymakers.

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SM

Oct 29, 2017 09:22am

It is refreshing to see that for once, the sky isn't falling. The author actually put forth a few decent arguments in favor of continuity rather than intervention. This goes to show that cutting down on the drama is actually a good thing. It allows for rational analysis of the problems we collectively face. Hysteria only promotes a sense of helplessness and stasis. Let us focus on coming up with solutions to our problems rather than useless rumor mongering.

I hope this can become a longer-term trend :)

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Afnan

Oct 29, 2017 03:02pm

Drama, conspiracy and crisis already exist and there are no visible signs of it going away any soon. Until our establishment keeps itself limited to defence matters only and parties like PTI stop making frequent efforts in getting umpire's finger rise.

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AW

Oct 29, 2017 04:18pm

Excellent analysis of the ground reality. There is no way out other than complete reformation of the system even it
takes 15 years of dictatorship to permanently hold. Without reforms, the country will stay on the course of corruption, poverty and weakness.

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ampak

Oct 30, 2017 06:20am

respectfully dont agree with this speculation

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auginpk

Oct 30, 2017 07:30am

@ampak

Dear

This is what would happen.

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GK Swamy

Oct 30, 2017 09:24am

Irrespective of quality of politicians available, they are far far better than any autocrat or a military general. Politicians are accountable to their people always and everytime unlike others. A bumbling democracy should be kept alive rather than choosing silly alternatives. Politicians come from same populace and hence they cannot be of higher standard as compared to quality of people in general!! This is the bane of Asia and we have to live with it may be for another 100 years before new set of people come in.

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Usman

Oct 30, 2017 08:20pm

While I can appreciate the author's analysis...and I do agree that a coup would likely result in short-sighted politicians clearing the chessboard upon the return of "democracy", I'd like to hear more on why the author actually believes that democracy is the best system for a country like Pakistan. I'm not convinced that it is, and believe that a longer-term "dictatorship" would facilitate the changes necessary in Pakistani institutions, so that the eventual return to democracy (say, 20 years down the line), would actually benefit the country. The current political system in Pakistan is neither democratic, nor effective.